India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has pledged to ramp up testing to one million per day over the next few weeks to tackle one of the world’s worst outbreaks of the coronavirus.

But can he achieve this, and are the tests being used reliable?

How much testing is India doing now?

At the start of August, around half a million tests were being carried out each day across India on a week’s average, according to the international comparison site, Our World in Data. Daily figures released by the Indian government are slightly higher than this.

This is a large number but should be put in the context of the size of India’s population.

It carries out around 36 tests each day for every 100,000 people. In comparison, the figure for South Africa is 69, for Pakistan it’s eight, and for the United Kingdom it’s 192.

Prime Minister Modi’s ambition is to double this number to achieve a million tests each day for a …continued .
[Source: CNBC News]